PRO BASKETBALL

PRO BASKETBALL; Trying to Fill Jordan's Shoes

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: November 7, 2003

The Air Zoom Generation sneakers on LeBron James's size 13 feet have run up and down courts in Sacramento, Phoenix, Portland and Cleveland, carrying him to two great games and two mediocre ones.

On national television, Jim Gray of ESPN displayed the sneakers like an eager salesman for Athlete's Foot.

At 18 years old, James has the feet and face of the 21st-century Nike.

Those shoes, which James is being paid as much as $100 million to wear and endorse until he is 25, are less sneakers than marketing tools, more of an initial public offering of stock than a pair of $110 sneakers.

James's Hummer-themed shoe will not officially go on sale until Dec. 20, the day of his 27th game for the Cavaliers, in Chicago -- home to the tootsies that still sustain the robust sales of Nike's Air Jordan lines.

''This is like a drug company whose blockbuster drug has just come off its patent,'' said John Horan, publisher of Sporting Goods Intelligence, a trade newsletter. ''You need another blockbuster. Whether it's realistic or not, we'll see.''

Nike is paying James to be what Shaquille O'Neal, Tracy McGrady, Allen Iverson or Kobe Bryant (who signed a $40 million deal with Nike shortly before his arrest) have not been to the basketball shoe market: a personality so broad-based and compelling that his shoes and apparel transcend age, demographic and ethnic barriers to become a lifestyle.

Remember that Michael Jordan also sold a musky cologne for a while.

Even in retirement, as Jordan the player has morphed more fully into the Jordan Brand, seven models of his Nikes are still ranked among the top-selling 10 basketball shoes, according to SportScan Info, a market research firm.

It has been 19 years since Nike signed Jordan for a reported $2.5 million over five years, and much has changed. There was no Internet then, no chance to see the latest Jordan commercial on the Web. Converse was the big basketball shoe then; that company eventually went bankrupt and was acquired by Nike.

Jordan was not the subject of an all-out marketing blitz by Nike before his first game. ''With Michael, you really didn't see it until his second year, but with LeBron, we're starting right away,'' said Lynn Merritt, senior director of Nike Basketball. ''He's coming in with so much cachet and visibility.''

One leading indicator of James's attraction is that nearly a half-million of his licensed jerseys were sold before the season began.

''The jersey only started selling at the end of June, which is quite an accomplishment,'' said Neil Schwartz, marketing director of SportScan Info. ''If his shoes sell anything like his jersey, it should be a hit.''

James is one of hundreds of athletes who endorse Nike products, including 75 basketball players. The sheer volume of endorsing athletes demonstrates Nike's belief in paying players to wear its shoes or use its equipment. This year its commitments to players total $274 million, and next year they should rise to $338 million, Nike said in a public filing.

An average of about $13 million a year will go to James, who ''appeals to a wide range of adults, young kids and teens'' in Nike's focus groups and surveys, Merritt said.

Not surprisingly, Nike is positioning him as the spokesman for PE2Go, its physical education initiative for elementary school students.

If the earliest Jordan television commercials started the deification of His Airness (with witty ads directed by and co-starring Spike Lee, as the superfan Mars Blackmon), the first one for James shows him toying with fame.

In a staged game filmed in late September against Sacramento, James looks dazed; he holds the ball just beyond the 3-point line for 51 seconds (yet is not called for a violation, the prerogative of a budding megastar in a corporate-fueled fantasy) before he smiles, whoops, drives to the hoop and says, ''That's funny.''

Another TV ad in the campaign will start Dec. 1.

The shoe on James's feet is nothing revolutionary. Its sole features two treads that go in different directions to enhance stop-and-go play. The holes for the laces resemble the door handle of the Hummer H2 (the one his mother bought for him in high school), and the stripe on the front of the shoe is borrowed from trim on the Hummer's wheel well.

Nike will initially sell the shoes in two color schemes: white and black, like his road sneaker, and white and Cavaliers wine red, like his home shoe. The former will be in wider distribution than the latter because it matches the apparel better. Eventually, there will be six color combinations.

Revolutionary or not, expectations are enormous for the first crop of Air Zoom Generations among retailers already persuaded that James might be Jordan Redux. James's shoe has huge historical competition: revenue for the first year of Air Jordans totaled more than $100 million, according to ''Playing for Keeps,'' David Halberstam's biography of Jordan.

R. Shawn Neville, president of Footaction USA, a chain of 430 athletic shoe and apparel stores, has high hopes. ''We think this may be one of the biggest initial launches we've ever had,'' he said. ''The buzz is very good from the kids in the stores. His first game was so strong that his jersey sales jumped significantly. A couple of spectacular dunks and his unselfishness and he's probably already exceeded expectations.''

Retailers will get their supplies by Dec. 20, Neville said, and that is all they will receive until the next James version with a different color scheme comes out. ''They're building consumer demand to outstrip supply,'' he said. ''Nike's never tried to oversaturate the market.''

Alan Cohen, chairman of Finish Line, a 510-store chain, said: ''We expect to sell out in a day or two. Nike understands marketing a great product around a personality better than anyone. The great lesson is tight supply.''

Last week, both chains received small allotments of the shoes James wears for home games and sold them out rapidly.

At one Finish Line outlet in Cleveland, the shoe sold out in one hour. At the five Footaction stores that got the Air Zooms, Neville said, there was no advertising, no advance word to customers. ''They blew out,'' Neville said. ''Nike wanted to create some buzz and seed the business.''

Merritt said the truest gauge of the popularity of James's sneakers will be in early 2005 when the next newly designed model comes out in time for the All-Star Game. Designers will have 18 to 20 months to craft a new technology, not the few months it took to create the first sneaker.

By then, Nike and the hoops world will know more about the playing skills of their very expensive teenage pitchman.

Photos: Nike's Air Zoom Generation line made its N.B.A. debut Oct. 29 in Sacramento on the feet of LeBron James. Sales to the public are to begin Dec. 20, the day James first plays as a pro in Chicago. (Photo by Associated Press)(pg. D1); Nike still gets mileage out of its Air Jordans, with 7 of the 10 top selling sneaker models. (Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. D3)